Professor Carole Yauk regularly partners with the OECD, HESI and Health Canada to conduct research in the area of genetics and toxicology. She explains that international and intersectoral collaborations are highly advantageous for the improvement of STEM. Governments, industries, academics and experts in many sectors worldwide work together in a round-table approach to mutually make decisions and resolve conflicts in advance to expedite uptake of new tools and findings.
Developed by the OECD, the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework is an important program to which Prof. Yauk contributes. An AOP describes the entire trajectory of a toxicological pathway in a simplified format, from the moment of contact of toxic substances with an organism to the effects produced. The AOP program addresses problems associated with conventional toxicology testing methods that rely on time-consuming and costly animal tests. Instead, AOPs promote the use of in vitro and computer models to predict toxic outcomes. AOPs are entered into an open access database — AOP-Wiki — which helps identify gaps in knowledge and testing, is readily updated, and is publicly available for use within the regulatory and research community. Prof. Yauk’s recent article “AOP report: Development of an adverse outcome pathway for oxidative DNA damage leading to mutations and chromosomal aberrations” appears on the front cover of Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis and is published alongside an opening editorial from Dr. Yauk and handling editor Dr. Jason O’Brien to introduce the launch of “AOP Report” article types for the journal.
Prof. Yauk’s also co-leads of a project with the US Environmental Protection Agency (Dr. Josh Harrill), the University of Birmingham (Prof. Mark Viant) and Health Canada (Dr. Matthew Meier) to develop an ‘omics reporting framework at the OECD. ‘Omics technologies are used to study global changes in biomolecules in cells (e.g., genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, etc.). The ‘omics reporting framework provides a template to report all aspects of producing and processing a toxicology ‘omics dataset in a regulatory submission package, and ensures that end-user can fully understand how the data set was produced. Importantly, this project supports efforts to reduce the use of animal tests, since ‘omics can be done in vitro and provides information on many potential endpoints in parallel.
Finally, in partnership Health Canada (Dr. Francesco Marchetti), TwinStrand BioSciences (Seattle, USA), and a multi-sector working group in HESI (includes the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the US Food and Drug Administration, the Norwegian Public Health Institute, Litron Laboratories, Charles River Laboratories, Roche, and Pfizer), Prof. Yauk is establishing and validating novel error-corrected sequencing technology for regulatory mutagenicity assessment. The technology attaches unique barcodes to each individual strand of original double-stranded DNA molecules sequenced. Analysis by computers identifies errors introduced when these strands are reproduced for sequencing, which are removed. These new error-corrected sequencing technologies can measure low levels of mutations in any animal, in any tissue and provide accurate and timely results. Prof. Yauk’s team received a Burroughs Wellcome Trust Innovations in Regulatory Science award for this work.
Read more:
- AOP report: Development of an adverse outcome pathway for oxidative DNA damage leading to mutations and chromosomal aberrations
- Introducing AOP Reports: Collaborative review and publication of adverse outcome pathways
- OECD: Adverse Outcome Pathways, Molecular Screening and Toxicogenomics
- AOP-Wiki
- Progress towards an OECD reporting framework for transcriptomics and metabolomics in regulatory toxicology
- Carole Yauk - GREAT LAB